Is the world a simulation? Possibly, yes, but probably not. The better question given the current technological trend in the world is – is the world running on NVIDIA GPUs? Makes one definitely wonder. So to get an answer, AIM asked this question to Jensen Huang, the chief of NVIDIA. 

He closed in, confidently looked straight in the eyes and said, “a 100%.”

To put games into perspective, starting as a graphic accelerator company, NVIDIA decided to use that technology within games, and undoubtedly, it was a success, or probably even a revolution. Gaming is now the largest entertainment industry in the world, bypassing film and television combined. 

According to Huang, there are more than 1 billion gamers in the world, but there are 8 billion people in the world. “Someday everybody’s going to be a gamer,” revealing about NVIDIA’s long time dream. Undoubtedly, the dream is getting realised sooner than later, and AI is definitely helping pave the way for it.

AI or not, metaverse is a game for sure

Huang says that AI has actually made gaming better, and gaming has actually made AI better. “We used AI to revolutionise computer graphics. Graphics enabled AI, and now AI is saving graphics.” He further explains how gaming is getting the spotlight again with companies training AI agents on games “and building something crazy out there.” 

For example, Sony AI’s superhuman AI agent GT Sophy that learned to drive cars from scratch without human intervention, through the hyper-realistic game Grand Turismo 7. 

Interestingly, even OpenAI, the company obsessed over achieving its AGI dream, actually is paving the way through investing in AI agents within games. Its latest acquisition of the 3D world creating company Global Illumination is definitely a sign that gaming indeed would be an essential part of trying AI in a simulation, and then deploying it into the world. And undoubtedly, NVIDIA has been proven right yet again. 

One might be too quick to point out that the company is shifting its focus into the AI industry. But fulfilling the gaming dream is still what the company aims to do. The second quarter revenue of the company also hinted at the same dream. The revenue was up by 22% in gaming for the company, regardless of that AI was the biggest contributor for its revenue. 

NVIDIA’s goal was to make video games more and more realistic. But now, it seems like reality is becoming more and more gamified, with everyone talking about AI, living in simulated worlds, and the eventual oncoming of the metaverse is going to make it even more gamified. Seems like NVIDIA just stumbled upon AI when it was actually headed for making gaming big all this while.

Not just agents, several game companies are already leveraging generative AI. And no, it’s not just to make AI generated assets and graphics, it’s characters within games. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim announced in May, that it is going to integrate Inworld AI, allowing players to converse with NPCs, harnessing the power of LLMs.

GPU built reality, within games

At the moment, all of the big-tech that are trying to create AI worlds are actually just relying on NVIDIA to be the backbone of it all. All the AI companies have been gossiping about how many GPUs each company has, and some are even ready to trade them for building their AI models. But interestingly, NVIDIA is comfortably confident about its position in the market, as Huang says, “there’s more, come get them. Everybody should win.”

The more the research goes into AI, the more companies would have to run their AI models in a game world before deploying them into the real world. NVIDIA knew this all this while. When Omniverse was launched, Huang said that it is a way to “connect the 3D world with the shared virtual universe.” 

It seems like, soon everyone will have their avatars in the virtual world and will be playing role-playing games (RPGs), which is the actual definition of a gamer. Indeed, as Huang said, everyone would win in the next game version of themselves. The next simulated reality would actually be running on NVIDIA GPUs.

This in the end, would make everyone a gamer, running their lives on GPUs. If Huang is correct, there would be 8 billion of us playing against each other on an online server. Not to be scared, but Huang says that his next big reinvention would be to make “AI meet the physical world”, and yes, it’s already here.